Griffey’s countdown to 600

CINCINNATI — Home runs never defined Ken Griffey Jr.

The backward cap. The can-you-believe-it smile. The Gold Glove that turned flyballs into mesmerizing outs. The arm that made runners think twice. He’s always been much more than that short, sweet swing.

Now that he’s on the verge of a very powerful number, nothing has changed.

The Cincinnati Reds outfielder opens the season today only seven homers shy of 600. The countdown started late last season, and will occupy fans for the first few weeks of the new one.

Griffey? He’s got other things in mind.

The 38-year-old All-Star has never doted on personal statistics. In his mind, numbers don’t define what he does or why he does it. That part isn’t changing.

Griffey is still living in the moment.

“It’s just a number that’s coming up,” he said in an interview as spring training wound down. “But that’s not the biggest number. The biggest number is the next one (No. 594) and then the next one after that. You can’t look at something that’s dangling out there when you have something in front of you that you have to get first. You get that one, then worry about the next one.

“It’s like a pitcher. You can’t worry about the guy on deck when you’ve still got a guy (at the plate) who’s a hitter.”

When he arrived in Cincinnati from Seattle before the 2000 season, Griffey was ahead of Hank Aaron’s home run pace. Barely 30 at the time, he was already an All-Century outfielder and one of the game’s most popular players.

A whole generation of young fans turned their caps backward and tried to be like Junior. His hometown was already daydreaming about glory years.

There hasn’t been a whole lot of that.

During his second season in Cincinnati, Griffey tore his left hamstring. For the next few years, he was defined more by injuries — torn patella tendon, torn hamstring, dislocated shoulder, torn ankle, another torn hamstring, dislocated toe — than statistics.

He slipped further and further behind Aaron’s pace. By 2006, he had practically slipped out of the conversation about the game’s elite players.

No more.

Griffey batted .277 with 30 homers and 93 RBI last season, when he made the All-Star team for the first time in three years. He played in 144 games, his highest total since the year he arrived in Cincinnati.

When it was over, Griffey was only seven swings away from joining Barry Bonds, Aaron, Babe Ruth, Willie Mays and Sammy Sosa with 600 career homers. It’s a short list indeed.

“With certain things if you play long enough, good things will happen,” Griffey said. “I think that’s the beauty of anything, if you do it long enough. Obviously you’ve done some good things to be able to do it for a long time.”

As he approaches the mark, it’s the other things that stand out.

“People change over time,” Reds manager Dusty Baker said. “Basically, he’s still the same Junior I remember when he signed. He’s not jaded. He still enjoys the game. He still has a good time.

“A lot of times as we get older, you lose that fun and innocence of youth. But Junior is still the same Junior I knew a long time ago.”

It’s part of his personality to focus on the moment. He doesn’t waste time thinking about what might have been if he hadn’t gotten hurt. He doesn’t speculate about how far he might yet go.

“I’ve never heard him talking about records,” Baker said. “You hear other people talking about what he could have done if he hadn’t been hurt. He could have been where Barry Bonds is right now, because there was a time when he was ahead of Barry. But you never hear him talk about it.”

Unlike Bonds, there’s never been a hint that Griffey cut corners to reach his numbers. He has come through baseball’s steroids era unscathed.

Another thing that hasn’t changed: Griffey keeps his family front-and-center. His father, Ken Sr., introduced him to the game when he was an outfielder on the Big Red Machine. The two of them played together for Seattle in 1990-91.

Asked to pick his favorite accomplishment during his 19 years in the majors, Griffey didn’t hesitate to come up with a family moment.

“Play with my dad,” he said. “That’s probably my favorite memory so far.”

Griffey is entering the final season of his nine-year, $116.5 million deal. He makes $12.5 million, the same as in each of the last seven years.

There’s a club option for 2009 at $16.5 million, with a $4 million buyout. Once this season ends, his future will become a hot topic. He’s still the team’s marquee player and its biggest gate attraction.

But, that’s something for later.

Griffey is more focused on helping the Reds break their run of seven straight losing seasons, their longest slump in a half-century. The one thing that has eluded him is the World Series — Seattle made it to the AL championship series in 1995 before losing to Cleveland.

“But that doesn’t put a damper on anything that I’ve done,” Griffey said. “Some people are just luckier than others. That’s the nature of it.”

He thought about how he’s been lucky in other ways. Into his mind popped a nice, round number that was even more satisfying than 600.

“I got to play baseball for 20 years,” he said.